Tag: Labour

Gary Lubner, the former boss of Autoglass, the car glass repair company, gave £2.2m last May and is believed to be contributing more than that again before the next election…reports Asian Lite News

Labour has been raking in private donations after making a big effort to woo business leaders and wealthy philanthropists over the last three years. The campaign has been spearheaded by donor Waheed Alli, a media executive, but also driven by Tony Blair’s former chief fundraiser Michael Levy – both Labour peers. Their efforts have returned a few New Labour-era donors to the fold, optimistic that Starmer has turned the party’s fortunes around, and a large number of new names have cropped up as well.

The trade unions, membership subscriptions and fundraising events such as party conference make up a large part of the funding pot, but these are the big individual donors contributing to Labour’s campaign coffers right now:

David Sainsbury, a Labour peer since 1997 and scion of the supermarket dynasty, deserves a category of his own after donating a couple of million pounds a year to Labour during the New Labour era, and serving as a science minister for eight years under Blair. He largely stopped donating to Labour during the Jeremy Corbyn era, apart from funding the party’s remain campaign, and then announced he would stop giving money to political causes after the 2017 election. However, he subsequently became the largest single donor in political history when he made a £8m donation to the Liberal Democrats in 2019.

Under Starmer, he has firmly become a Labour donor again, giving £2m last October and then £3m in April, as well as funding other thinktanks such as the Institute for Government, and educational causes such as the University of Cambridge. His daughter, Fran Perrin, is also a major Labour donor in her own right, giving over £1m to the party under Starmer’s leadership.

Gary Lubner, the former boss of Autoglass, the car glass repair company, gave £2.2m last May and is believed to be contributing more than that again before the next election. He told the FT at the time that he had wanted to put the party in power for a long time. Born in South Africa, he has said his political views had been shaped by being conscripted into the police during apartheid, and his grandparents having come to South Africa to escape Jewish pogroms in Russia.

Dale Vince, the founder of gas and electricity supplier Ecotricity, has given at least £1.4m to the party through his company since 2014. Ecotricity gave small sums throughout the last decade but its contributions really ramped up in the Starmer era with a £500,000 gift in October last year. However, the donations have caused Labour some controversy, as he has also bankrolled Just Stop Oil in recent years, triggering a Tory attack on the party for being funded by an “eco zealot”. Vince recently said he would stop funding Just Stop Oil to concentrate on his political donations.

Sir Victor Blank, the former chair of Lloyds TSB, has resumed making donations, giving £175,000 since 2020, much of which was used to fund staff for the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Blank previously donated £150,000 to Ed Miliband’s election effort.

Martin Taylor is a hedge fund supremo who contributed £600,000 during the Miliband era. He has been funding Labour centrally, but is giving more to the Labour Together group, including £100,000 in July.

Stuart Roden, best known for his time as chair of Lansdowne Partners, has given £180,000 to the party this year.

Waheed Alli, who made his money in TV production and is a Labour peer, has led the party’s fundraising efforts under Starmer. He has given almost £300,000 in the last few years. Grant Mansfield, founder of the TV production company Plimsoll, gave £50,000 earlier this year.

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Labour economy spokeswoman Rachel Reeves told delegates at the party’s annual conference that “Labour will tax fairly and spend wisely”…reports Asian Lite News

The Labour Party said that it will focus on economic growth rather than higher taxes to “rebuild” the country after more than a decade of Conservative rule.

Labour economy spokeswoman Rachel Reeves told delegates at the party’s annual conference that “Labour will tax fairly and spend wisely.”

“But I must tell you, you cannot tax and spend your way to economic growth,” she said. “The lifeblood of a growing economy is business investment.”

Reeves was making her pitch to British voters and businesses at the four-day conference in Liverpool, where Labour is trying to cement its front-runner status in opinion polls before an election due in 2024.

The party is running 15 or more points ahead of the governing Conservatives in multiple opinion polls, as Britain endures a sluggish economy and a cost-of-living crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and economic disruption following the U.K.’s exit from the European Union.

Labour is trying to show it can provide an alternative to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, who have been in power since 2010. But the opposition party is wary of promising big public spending increases that would require tax hikes. The social democratic party also wants to convince corporate Britain that it is on the side of business.

For years, businesses were wary of the party, which has its roots in the trade union movement, and tended to favor the Conservatives. But recent economic and political upheavals have made many think again.

Reeves said a Labour government would get the economy growing faster to fund public services and boost investment through a new national wealth fund. She pledged to build 1.5 million homes to ease Britain’s chronic housing crisis, reform an “antiquated” planning system Labour says is holding back infrastructure improvements, and repair the creaking, overburdened state-funded National Health Service.

Money for health and education will come from abolishing “non-domiciled” tax status, which allows some wealthy individuals to avoid paying U.K. tax, and ending private schools’ tax-free status, she said.

Reeves said Labour also will strengthen workers’ rights and abolish “zero hours” contracts that do not guarantee employees a minimum number of hours a week.

The speech was broadly welcomed by both business and workers’ groups — no mean feat. Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the Confederation of British Industry, said businesses would be “encouraged” to hear Labour “speak so ambitiously about driving up business investment and committing to tackle some of the key blockers.”

Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB trade union, said Reeves’ speech “gave a far-sighted vision of a better U.K.”

Reeves also said a Labour government would appoint a “COVID corruption commissioner” to try to recoup some of the billions lost to fraud and waste during the pandemic.

Reeves said the commissioner would bring together tax officials, fraud investigators and law enforcement officers to track down an estimated 7.2 billion pounds ($8.8 billion) in lost public money spent on grants and contracts related to COVID-19, and “get back every penny of taxpayers’ money that they can.”

Like many countries, the U.K. was forced to sidestep usual rules as it rushed to procure essential supplies and prop up people’s livelihoods during the coronavirus pandemic.

A multi-year public inquiry is examining Britain’s handling of the pandemic, which left more than 200,000 people in the country dead.

Leader Keir Starmer has steered Labour back toward the political middle ground after the divisive tenure of predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, a staunch socialist who advocated nationalization of key industries and infrastructure. Corbyn resigned after Labour suffered its worst election defeat in almost a century in 2019.

The brutal, shocking attack by Hamas militants on Israel, and Israel’s military response, overshadowed the gathering of a party that has spent several years confronting allegations that antisemitism was allowed to fester under Corbyn, a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause.

After being elected leader in 2020, Starmer apologized and vowed to restore relations between Labour and the Jewish community. Corbyn was expelled from the party.

The conference schedule includes several meetings by pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups, including one on Monday organized by Labour Friends of Palestine that opened with 30 seconds of silence to reflect on the “horrors” of recent days.

In a speech to delegates, party foreign affairs spokesman David Lammy said that Labour “utterly condemns Hamas’s appalling attack on Israel.”

“There is never a justification for terrorism,” he said. “Labour stands firmly in support of Israel’s right to defend itself, rescue hostages and protect its citizens.”

He reiterated Labour’s support for a two-state solution that now seems a distant prospect.

“There will not be a just and lasting peace until Israel is secure, Palestine is a sovereign state and both Israelis and Palestinians enjoy security, dignity and human rights,” Lammy said.

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